August went by so fast that I don’t feel like I was able to get everything done.
Scratch that, I know I didn’t get everything done. Website content got completed because it was largely completed in July, but then Patreon content got drafted or recorded and I didn’t polish or publish. But to quote Dulé Hill in Holes:
First, July was stressful but also… clearly more chill than June.
I think there was less direct harassment – that I saw, at least – in July. I’m sure it’s still out there because I’m basically a non-person to multiple fandoms and that justifies the weird and wrong shit people say and do to me, but… I didn’t see it very much this time. I didn’t even block that many people this month so that’s pretty nice. I hate feeling like I have to cut myself off from people. (Which is very funny because I had to make a policy change on my website that does cut me off from people! More on that at the bottom.)
The main stresses I had to deal with were familial or health related (and again, I really need a job with benefits), but they were manageable. I got to spend two weeks with the wee niece Meems here with me and while I orbit her when she’s here, she also helped me with a ton more work than I was expecting. (And yes she will be compensated fairly for her work.)
And because of the lack of harassment along with Meems’ help as a mini research buddy, I was able to do a lot this past month.
Read More »In returning to Twilight — or starting the series for the first time — fans are coming across things they didn’t know about the vampires in the series. A major example? Jasper Cullen’s pre-vampire past as… a Confederate major in the Civil War. As young adult author Camryn Garrett pointed out during her own rewatch of the series, the fact that Jasper fought on the wrong side of the Civil War is never addressed again outside of the lone mention in Eclipse.
Twilight’s Jasper Cullen Is Part of Confederate Vampire History
I love vampires. Oh my god do I love vampires. (Slightly less than I love werewolves, but that is absolutely a personal problem.) Getting to stretch my muscles as a literature MA – this is absolutely what I did in college right down to talking about Twilight in the context of Fifty Shades of Gray and fic as something we use to take over Text – was pretty darn neat. And of course, I got to watch a lot of vampire-oriented media this week! It was great because I was cuddled up to Meems, my littlest niece, the entire time. The only thing I didn’t subject her to was True Blood because that is OBVIOUSLY not appropriate for her age.
I had a wonderful time researching and writing this column and I’m looking forward to writing more cool things in August! 😀
Please go share the tweet below or the link to the article itself on your own social media profiles and pages!
[Still in progress.]
Originally posted on Patreon at the $1 Tier on 4/2/2021,
Source: What Fandom Racism Looks Like: Phone A Friend of Color
If there’s one fandom behavior I wish I could Thanos-snap out of existence, it would be the habit that many people have of tagging in POC to d-d-d-d-duel each other in the name of fandom discourse. It’s not just that it’s annoying and allows people adhering like glue to the one-drop rule to wave their 23-and-me test results in the face of other POC they’re stepping on and speaking over. It’s also the fact that this sets up a situation of people of color being essentially stuck in a specific role, almost on a shelf away from the rest of fandom, until they can be useful.
No one will say outright that they think the only role people of color have in fandom that lets them be valued is to in/validate someone else’s point of view on race and racism. But that’s what it boils down to.
We can’t just do our own thing on our own.
Read More »For PCA 2021 – an academic conference on pop culture – I’m doing a presentation on an under-represented and researched type of international Korean idol fans: Black women and other femme-identity aligned people within our community.
A lot of the coverage of English language idol fandoms rightfully focuses on Asian fans (diasporic Koreans primarily, but also South East Asian fans as an incredibly large fanbase). I love the work I’ve read in media/fan studies circles because it’s helped deepen my understanding of these fandoms and how I can be a better fan on my own..
However, the thing I don’t like is how much more of this work explicitly or implicitly focuses on white fans even at a point of talking about things like fandom activism in the wake of May/June 2020’s BLM-related activism that was fueled by Black fans in different idol fandoms. There is a serious lack of understanding and research in fan/media studies and in mainstream-ish journalism about:
I did not get a lot done in April but also… wow did I get a lot done in April.
Yes, I got 16 different blog pieces out – including a stellar guest post about Alison from Doctor Who that I’m still pleased with – but for some reason it doesn’t feel like I did much of everything. Only like half of what I’d planned to put out actually made it out and I’m bummed because it was going to be great stuff… but I have to remember that I still had sixteen posts go out.
I’m still at almost 60k words on my site for 2021 so far. I had the two Fan Service posts in Teen Vogue (“How Ableism Can Manifest in Fandom—and How to End It” and “What “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” Teaches Us About Fandom Misogynoir” ). I did (sort of) two interviews. I’m officially someone who interviews other people despite how anxious that makes me. I’m one of the finalists for the Ignyte Awards’ Critics Award! (Go vote for me please!)
It’s not like I really sat here and did nothing in April.But my brain…It thinks otherwise.
Read More »Missed what I’ve been doing with Music Video Anatomy? For the most recent installments, I covered WA$$UP (와썹 and Bermuda Triangle! We’re back on our bullshit this time and talking about Zico and hip hop masculinity!
Title: Tough Cookie (Feat. Don Mills)
Artist: Zico
Setting:
The most iconic setting of Tough Cookie really is Zico in the bathtub and I think it’s what everyone thinks of if they’ve seen the video before.
However, I can’t stop thinking about how this video is set in different working class settings (a warehouse, a garage and its parking lot) and luxe-ish nightclub and barber shop settings. Fadeaway, an 1LLIONAIRE collab video with a bunch of heavy hitters in Korean hip hop that we’ll tackle later, has a similar but more polished feel when it comes to the juxtaposition of scenarios/settings.
I don’t know that Zico or the MVs director ever talked about why they chose the settings that they did, but I think it really does work for the understanding/presentation of hip hop as something simultaneously linked with Being Poor but also having success and excess.
Read More »I’m still struggling to get back in the groove after being yeeted off the path in February thanks to That Nonsense and just… all the awful terrible things in the news (like the escalation in anti-Asian hate crimes on top of some bad stuff in local politics/policing).
I’m still writing through the stress though and I’m still looking for a new Day Job as freelance is not actually feasible for me for long-term since you know… insurance. However, I think I finished everything I had planned for March or moved them around so I felt like I did!
Here are some March highlights for y’all from my neck of the woods:
So what’s up for April?
Read More »Originally posted as a thread April 30, 2019.
There’s a really good tumblr post about the progressiveness of fic (that boils down to “the OP can go to any bookstore and some grocery stores and easily find books about Black characters that don’t center white ones/whiteness and that really doesn’t happen in fandom”)
Read More »Still locked because people refuse to respect my boundaries, but if you have access to my main account the original thread is here. Lightly edited for clarity and to organize the points better.
Related to some publishing shit: the reason racefakers like the ones pretending to be super biracial/light skinned Black women or non-Black Latinx are able to succeed in publishing/education/fandom is because they benefit from playing off of anxieties about rejecting people based on their looks
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This marks my 7th March of having Stitch’s Media Mix be a thing.
Holy shit.
7 years of functionally doing the same thing – for someone who has 2 of their three degrees in different things and the attention span of a hard boiled egg – is incredible. And of course, it hasn’t been easy. A lot of people in fandom hate me. Which fandom? All fandoms!
(Seriously, I don’t even watch 99% of modern anime series that blow up or talk about them/their fandoms and yet so many weebs hate me because they think I care about their latest lolic0n fixation? Meanwhile the weebiest thing I’ve done recently is call Megan Thee Stallion one!)
But I’m still here!
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Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is probably the most important Gundam Series in my life – yes, even though I was very invested in the off-the-wall wackiness of G Gundam and would absolutely sacrifice myself so that Tieria and Neil Dylandy (the first Lockon Strators) could live happily ever after together. Gundam Wing was a series I was obsessed with as a teenager… and as a young adult… and now in my thirties.
I don’t wanna be like “who didn’t work on this series”, but Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has huge crew behind it. Produced by Sunriase and Directed by Masashi Ikeda and Shinji Takamatsu, this series’ script and story were written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa while the iconic character designs were done by Shukou Murase. If you’re a long time fan of mecha anime, you probably already knew that the best Gundams in the history of the franchise – and all the other mech and tech – were designed by Hajime Katoki, Junya Ishigaki, and Kunio Okawara!
These dudes pretty much built out the Gundams we can’t stop thinking about – and one day I will get a good Deathscythe model kit and put that bad boy together while drunk!
Read More »February was… a lot. 0/10 do not recommend.
While the harassment I’ve been detailing for months continues to escalate (now strangers are claiming I’ve done the, direct harm and that “PickMe” truly is a racist/misogynistic slur while coming for my writing gig in the name of fandom), I also got… a lot done?
Like anxiety spiraling as creeps on the internet try to destroy your life over shipping really does make you get shit done. Who would’ve thought the sleepless nights were good for something!)
Read More »You probably don’t know me. What I do for Stitch’s Media Mix, and Stitch, is largely unseen. I don’t engage in fandom the same way Stitch does— or for that matter the way most of you do— I tend to more actively interact with news and sports than I do with fiction, and I really enjoy avoiding fan spaces.
But I have known Stitch for over a decade. I know who they are as a person and who they are as an author, and who they are as a fan. I know the work Stitch puts in to every article that gets published on here, on Patreon, in Teen Vogue. And I believe in the work she’s doing. It’s VITAL that we actively think about, and actively engage in critiquing the entertainment we consume. If we cannot critique our entertainment, if we cannot place it in the large context of our society (both how it is informed by society and how society informs what we find entertaining) then we are not doing everything we can to make a better society.
And Stitch has chosen to not just apply critical analysis to fiction and to music, and to the reactions of the fans. She has chosen to take this really incredibly dense academic concept and make it accessible, both in terms of how it’s written (trust me, every single article Stitch writes could be SO MUCH more dense) but also how and where you have access to it.
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Stitch's Media Mix 
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